Friday, March 22nd

Notes on booking tickets:
Early bird bookings will be available here soon. Ticket prices are inclusive of booking fees.
All library events are free.

Four Chinese Poets TBA

11.30pm,
Grand Parade LibraryFree event

A reading by four poets from China – details to follow. The poets will read in Chinese. English translations will be provided in booklet form.

Prebooked Poetry Introductions

2.00pm,
Grand Parade LibraryFree event

The Prebooked Poetry Introductions will involve five individuals who have yet to publish a chapbook or full-length collection of poems. Each poet will have the opportunity to read three poems in an eight-minute reading slot and receive a reading fee of €100. If you would like a chance to partake in this event you must have at least two magazine publishing credits. Submit three poems with a biographical note through Submittable. The list of chosen poets will be posted here and on munsterlit.ie by March 1st.

Caitríona Ní Chléirchín & Simon Ó Faoláin

4.00pm,
Grand Parade LibraryFree event

Caitríona Ní Chléirchín is an Irish-language poet, critic and lecturer originally from Gortmoney, Emyvale in Co. Monaghan. Her debut collection, Crithloinnir, won the Oireachtas Prize for New Writers in 2010 and her second collection, An Bhrídeach Sí, published in 2014, won the Michael Hartnett Prize 2015. She has published poetry in Comhar, Irish Pages, Cyphers, The Stinging Fly, Feasta, Blaiseadh Pinn, The SHOp, An t-Ultach and An Guth. She writes academic and journalistic articles and has written over 20 reviews for The Irish Times, Comhar,Taighde agus Teagasc and others. She is also an Irish-language and literature lecturer at St. Patrick’s College DCU. Her doctorate was a psychoanalytical body-centred reading of the Irish-language contemporary poetry of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Biddy Jenkinson.

Simon Ó Faoláin was born in Dublin and raised in West Kerry. He trained as an archaeologist and has worked both in the private sector as an excavation director and as an academic in Celtic Studies. Following periods in Galway, Wales, Achill Island and Cork he returned to live in West Kerry in 2007. His first collection, Anam Mhadra (Coiscéim, 2008) won the Glen Dimplex Irish Award and the Eithne and Rupert Strong Award. He has won both the Colmcille Prize and the Foras na Gaeilge Prize twice. His first play, An Poll [The Hole] won the Walter Macken Prize from An Taibhdhearc in 2010. His second collection of poetry, As Gaineamh (Coiscéim) was published in 2011 and his third, Fé Sholas Luaineach, (Coiscéim) in 2014.

Both Caitríona Ní Chléirchín & Simon Ó Faoláin appear in Calling Cards, an anthology of ten younger Irish poets with translations into English, published in 2018 by The Gallery Press in partnership with Poetry Ireland.

Jonathan Edwards & Abigail Parry

7.00pm, Cork Arts Theatre (€5)
Tickets available soon

Jonathan Edwards second collection, Gen (Seren) was published in 2018. His first collection, My Family and Other Superheroes (Seren) won the prestigious Costa Poetry Award 2014 and the Wales Book of the Year People's Choice Award. It was shortlisted for the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. His poems have won prizes in the Cardiff International Poetry Competition, the Ledbury Festival International Poetry Competition and the Basil Bunting Award, and appeared in magazines including Poetry Review, New Welsh Review, Poetry Wales and The North. He works as a teacher.

Abigail Parry spent seven years as a toymaker before completing her doctoral thesis on wordplay. Her poems have been set to music, translated into Spanish and Japanese, broadcast on BBC and RTÉ Radio, and widely published in journals and anthologies. She has won a number of prizes and awards for her work, including the Ballymaloe Prize, the Troubadour Prize, and an Eric Gregory Award. Her first collection, Jinx, published by Bloodaxe in 2018, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2018.

Sasha Dugdale & Karen McCarthy Woolf

8.30pm, Cork Arts Theatre (€5)
Tickets available soon

Poet, playwright, and translator Sasha Dugdale was born in Sussex, England. She has worked as a consultant for theatre companies in addition to writing her own plays. From 1995 to 2000, she worked for the British Council in Russia. She has published four collections of poetry with Carcanet, Notebook (2003), The Estate (2007), Red House (2011), and Joy (2017). In 2017 she was awarded a Cholmondeley Prize. Between 2012 and 2017 she was editor of Modern Poetry in Translation. She is co-director of the Winchester Poetry Festival.

Born in London to English and Jamaican parents, Karen McCarthy Woolf’s first book-length collection, An Aviary of Small Birds (Carcanet, 2014), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, was shortlisted for both the Forward and Aldeburgh Best First Collection Prizes, and selected as a Guardian/Observer book of the month by Kate Kellaway, who described it as a ‘beautiful, painful, pitch-perfect debut’. Her second collection, Seasonal Disturbances was published by Carcanet in 2017. Her poems have been translated into Spanish, Turkish and Swedish, selected for Poems on the Underground, made into poetry film and dance collaborations and dropped from a helicopter over the Houses of Parliament.

Ciaran Carson & David Harsent

10.00pm, Cork Arts Theatre (€5)
Tickets available soon

Ciaran Carson was born in 1948 in Belfast, where he lives. He worked in the Arts Council of Northern Ireland from 1975 to 1998, with responsibility for Traditional Music, and, more latterly, Literature. In October 2003 he was appointed Professor of Poetry and Director of the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University, Belfast. He is the author of fourteen collections of poems, including The Irish for No (1987), winner of the Alice Hunt Bartlett Award; Belfast Confetti (1990), which won the Irish Times Irish Literature Prize for Poetry; and First Language: Poems (1993), winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize. His 2015 collection From Elsewhere was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection. His latest book, From There to Here (Selected Poems and Translations) was published by The Gallery Press in 2018.

David Harsent won the 2014 TS Eliot prize for his book Fire Songs. His most recent collection, Salt, was published by Faber & Faber in 2017. Night (2011), a Poetry Book Society Choice, was shortlisted for the Costa, Forward and T. S. Eliot poetry prizes and won the Griffin International Poetry Prize. He won the 2005 Forward Prize for Legion, which was also shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize and the TS Eliot Award; he has also been the recipient of the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Award, an Eric Gregory Award, two Arts Council bursaries and a Society of Authors Fellowship. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Distinguished Writing Fellow at Hallam, Sheffield University. His work in music theatre has involved collaborations with a number of composers, but most often with Harrison Birtwistle, and has been performed at the Royal Opera House, the South Bank Centre, Carnegie Hall and the Proms.